If you find yourself using NDAs and Confidentiality Agreements often, you should be aware of the many ways that you can customize your standard documents to a specific relationship. Here’s a list of several provisions to watch out for.
Continue reading “Confidentiality and Nondisclosure Agreements: Top Tips for your NDAs and Confidentiality Agreements”When Am I Ready to File a Patent?
The innovation process is complex, iterative, and often undefined. This makes it hard to know when you’re ready to file for initial patent protection. Here are a few tips to think about what stage you should file.
Continue reading “When Am I Ready to File a Patent?”IP Strategy Roundup (16 June 2020)
IP Strategy sits at the crossroads of technology, law, and business. With a focus on competitive advantage, IP Strategy can be aligned with Business Strategy to create and exploit powerful positioning and meaningful differentiation within a competitive landscape.
Continue reading “IP Strategy Roundup (16 June 2020)”Get “Patent Pending” – The Number One Reason You Need a Provisional Patent Application to Protect Your Invention (and how to use our 30-day challenge to get “patent pending”)
Inventors are intelligent and inquisitive. That’s a good thing. That’s how your invention came about in the first place.
Be careful, though, of information overload which leads to confusion or, worse, poor decisions based on misinformation from a careless mentor, unscrupulous invention help company, or “social media expert.”
Continue reading “Get “Patent Pending” – The Number One Reason You Need a Provisional Patent Application to Protect Your Invention (and how to use our 30-day challenge to get “patent pending”)”Do you develop technology as an independent contractor? Here’s how you should think about defining your IP ownership, assignments, and licenses
There are a lot of moving parts when you start working together with another party on joint research & development or in an independent contractor relationship. One of the trickiest aspects is defining who will own the IP developed during the engagement. In fact, the IP ownership question can dictate the value of the contract or, alternatively, kill the deal if the parties can’t agree on a mutually acceptable approach.
Here is a list of options to help you think about several of the ways IP can be developed, owned, assigned, and licensed during an independent contractor or joint R&D project.
Continue reading “Do you develop technology as an independent contractor? Here’s how you should think about defining your IP ownership, assignments, and licenses”Should you File a Divisional, Continuation, or Continuation-in-Part before your Patent Issues?
Your patent claims are allowed. Your patent is going to issue soon. Congratulations!
Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to make an informed, strategic decision about whether to keep your patent options open by filing a new patent application and claiming priority to your allowed patent application while it is still pending.
You probably already know that patent applications can claim priority to each other. This lets applicants create a chain of applications, if they want. There are reasons to do this–sometimes the patent office restricts which claims can be examined, and other times applicants want to extend the pendency, or examination cycle, of their patent applications–and there are other reasons to avoid linking patent applications together.
Continue reading “Should you File a Divisional, Continuation, or Continuation-in-Part before your Patent Issues?”